jbouffard.com

So I purchased a Macbook Pro built-to-order back in May 2010. This computer has been rock solid up until a couple weeks ago. I installed Lion mid July this year. It has been running great until 10.7.2, I have experience what I think is described here. Not long after Apple acknowledged that issue, I have been experiencing serious memory malfunctions. I installed a 8GB Crucial RAM kit at the beginning of August. So the only modification I made to the laptop is my memory upgrade.

It became completely unusable on October 13th. I would fire it up and start a task, like syncing pictures to S3 via Transmit. This task would run great for some time and then the screen would go black and it would become unresponsive.

Today I had some free time, I decided to try to use it. I started it up. As soon as I turned it on I had 3 beeps of death. After Googling around a bit I found out that 3 beeps meant "no good banks". Next I figured I would open it up and put in the original 4GB of RAM. Success! I was able to use the computer normally for a few minutes. I shut it down. Powered it back on, "beep, beep, beep". Oh man.

So I have an appointment at the local Apple Store tomorrow. I'll report back after that.

Update: Oct 17

After talking with the Apple Store guys yesterday we determined that I will need a new logic board. I am not sending my hard drive in for repair. So at the moment I am waiting on some new equipment to do a proper back up and format before I send it into Apple.

I am still a little curious about the sequence of events that lead to my current situation, which seems to be a complete hardware failure. Let's recap:

So what seemed to start out as a software issue quickly became a hardware issue. Now I guess I could be wrong and this was a hardware issue from the beginning, but it seems the symptoms continuously got worse.